Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday January 05, 2013 @06:56PM
from the can-now-outmaneuver-Khan dept.

aloniv writes "The reverse-engineered free/libre and open source driver for NVIDIA cards Nouveau has reached another milestone. 'The Nouveau driver in the current Linux 3.8 development branch has recently acquired everything that's necessary to support the 3D acceleration features of any GeForce graphics hardware. Together with a current version of libdrm and the Nouveau 3D driver in Mesa 3D 9.0, this allows Linux applications to use 3D acceleration even with the most recent GeForce graphics cards."

The alternative is to sit back and pray someone else fixes it for you.

Since most of us obviously don't have the knowledge or time to fix bugs in the video card drivers we use, we are still relying on other people to fix the bugs whether the driver is open source or not. So, sorry, your argument isn't very convincing.

Of course most of us don't have the knowledge, but if we're motivated enough, we can obtain that knowledge. Worst case, we go to someone who does have the knowledge and say "here's $X, fix it". With closed drivers, none of that is even possible. You need $X**N to get noticed by most closed sources.

Right now they're pretty much the only ones that don't support open source. Intel long ago opened things up, and AMD is opening up everything they can legally open. nVidia hasn't shown any evidence of opening up, even though right now that means that they're completely closed off.

As much as I appreciate projects like Nouveau, it seems like the only way that nVidia will change it's mind is if people stop buying their products and go with AMD GPUs.

It's a choice between having a single source who can fix bugs, or a significantly larger pool of people who are capable of fixing those bugs. Employees of a single company are beholden to the business goals of that company, goals which are highly likely to differ from your needs as a user.

Err, why are my needs likely to differ greatly with the goals of the company? If I buy a product from a company, I'd say the chances are good that my needs jive with their goals. Especially in this case: Nvidia exists to make money, they make money by creating a product people want, and drivers that aren't buggy make their products more valuable. I'd say Nvidia inherently has a much better motivation to fix bugs in their drivers than a couple hundred random people scattered throughout the world.

I'm not arguing that open source isn't good, only that it should be the least of our concerns if we're evaluating driver quality. If Nvidia's own drivers were open source, that would obviously be better than the current situation, but that doesn't mean that open source drivers are always better than proprietary drivers. Reality shows greater evidence than this theoretical discussion: I'm glad people are scratching their itches and working on Nouveau, but those drivers are simply not nearly as good as the proprietary drivers. Not yet. Not in any meaningful or non-religious way. Not by a long shot.

Every time I see the "Intel is so much better with open source." I think the same thing:

Of course, they are more open that amd and nvidia, they're not serious contenders in graphics. Yes, they're popular, but performance wise, they have no secrets to keep. Amd and nvidia are in heated competition and because of that they want to keep their cards close to their respective chests.

LOL. You sound like someone who's never come in contact with a real open source project before. Let me fix this for you: "Volunteers of a single open source project are beholden to the goals of the open source community, goals which are highly likely to differ from your needs as a user." That's far more realistic. Throw in some rudeness and you've got it. At least with the business you can complain to someone.